As a quick refresher on the Snapdragon 820, it’s an ARMv8-A processor built on a 14nm FinFET process, with a quad-core CPU design. All four cores use Qualcomm’s proprietary Kryo architecture; two are clocked at 2.15 GHz, and the other two at 1.59 GHz. There’s also an Adreno 530 GPU at 624 MHz, a Hexagon 680 DSP at 1 GHz, and a 64-bit LPDDR4 memory controller at 29.8 GB/s.
The Xperia X Performance comes with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal NAND, with microSD card expansion supporting cards up to 200 GB. There’s also a 64 GB model available, which is the one I was sent to review. For connectivity, the X Performance supports up to Category 9 LTE on 19 bands, both in the single- and dual-SIM models, as well as six HSPA bands. This makes any X Performance model suitable for use worldwide. There’s also dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, A-GNSS, and NFC. System performance from the X Performance is just as good as any other flagship smartphone, and there might even be a small performance advantage due to the use of a 1080p display rather than 1440p. Let’s take a look at the benchmarks.
There’s nothing overly surprising here, with the Xperia X Performance boasting fantastic performance. In system benchmarks, this phone outperforms the Snapdragon 810-powered Xperia Z5 by 35%, with CPU-limited workloads revealing a 32% advantage. Compared to the now two-year-old Xperia Z2, powered by a Snapdragon 801, the new X Performance is more than twice as fast.
